1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tracking device and a tracking method for tracking a subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, when a picture of a moving body is taken or a moving image is taken, there has been known a technique for performing autofocus control (AF) and automatic exposure control (AE) to follow a specific subject. Tracking processing is used to follow such a specific subject.
During tracking, if a tracking target becomes obstructed, the tracking target may be lost or a wrong target may be tracked. To address this problem, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 9-065193 teaches that, in tracking processing using brightness information, when a correlation value of a subsequent image with respect to a tracking target area (a reference image in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 9-065193) set for a certain image is equal to or less than a preset reference value, it is temporarily determined that the subsequent image has no correlation with the reference image. Such processing is performed when the tracking target is obstructed to prevent erroneously determining that an obstruction is to be the tracking target.